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By Pastor Glenn Pease
In 563 BC, a son was born to a ruler in India.
The local astrologers predicted he would either be a great ruler, or a world renowned ascetic.
His father wanted to prevent that, so he sheltered his child from all contact with suffering of any kind.
The little prince was to never see life's sorrows.
But as he grew up he defied his father and slipped out of the palace to see life on the outside.
What he saw was a shock.
People were poor and sick and old and there was hardship and suffering everywhere.
He began to search for why this was and the conclusion he came to has influenced millions.
This prince was Buddha the founder of Buddhism.
He concluded that the whole problem with human beings was their desire.
They set their hearts on too many things, and expect the future to fulfill their hopes.
This leads to inevitable disappointment and misery.
The solution is quite simple.
You just eliminate desire.
If you aim for nothing that is likely what you will get.
But you won't be disappointed because that is just what you expected-nothing.
Buddhism is a negative religion where the goal is Nirvana, which means extinction.
It is the elimination of all desire, hope and anticipation.
The closer you can come to this in life, the greater saint you are.
To be detached from all things and people so that you no longer care if they are destroyed or die, the better off you are.
You can't be disappointed if you desire nothing.
This sounds awful and depressing to us maybe, but we have to face this reality, there is a measure of truth in it.
Desire to be like God led Adam and Eve to fall, and much of the sin and folly in the Bible is due to illegitimate desires.
Ruel Howe in his book, The Creative Years, tells of the bright outgoing young woman who collapsed on the eve of her wedding day.
She got more and more depressed and tried to take her own life.
She had to be put in a mental hospital where she continued to deteriorate.
She sat in a corner and refused to respond in any way.
This went on for weeks and months, and all she did was sit crumpled in a corner, a symbol of living death.
An artist working on a portrait of the superintendent heard about her and asked to see her.
He took a piece of moist clay and began to work with it in front of her.
He did this for weeks, and finally one day she reached out for the clay.
Some weeks later she began to try to mold it.
She became frustrated that she could not do it, and in anger hurled the clay against the wall.
She then looked in terror at the artist to see his reaction.
He just picked it up and brought it back to her and said, "It's alright, I still like you."
Then she spoke her first words in many months-"You still like me!"
That was the turning point, and from then on she made rapid progress in her recovery.
They were finally able to figure out what had gone wrong.
It was a simple case of excessive expectation.
She was bright and talented, and her parents wanted her to be popular and to succeed in every endeavor.
She worked her heart out and became cheerleader, homecoming queen and valedictorian.
When she faced the expectations of marriage and the added demands of a husband, it was an overload on her spirit.
She broke and retreated into sickness in order to escape.
Buddha was right; all of this misery was due to hopes and desires.
By expecting less everyone involved in this true story could have experienced more joy and less sorrow.
Those who expect too much, and who desire perfection are doomed to disappointment in a fallen world.
Buddha had a point, but he took it too far.
To anticipate and expect nothing would have been to waste the gifts of this girl, and rob her of the potential of being what she could be.
Somewhere between expect everything and expect nothing there is a place for expect something.
About the same time that Buddha was teaching his desire nothing philosophy, there was a prophet called of God to take a message to his people.
Haggai was his name, and encouragement was his game.
The people had come back from Babylon to rebuild the temple with high expectations.
But their enthusiasm was soon shattered.
The Samaritans so hindered the work that the project was abandoned.
The cities were in ruins and the land was a mess, and their neighbors were hostile.
They came back with high hopes of peace and prosperity, and this is what they find.
Maybe Buddha was right.
Their misery was because they expected too much.
Then Haggai came on the scene, and he urges then to get back to their dreams and rebuild the temple.
God never promised you a rose garden.
Sure it is hard, and there are obstacles to overcome, but let me tell you a little about the future.
The best is yet to be.
God's glory to going to fill this temple and there will be a peace come upon you as never before.
The Desired of all the nations is going to come to this temple that God wants you to build.
Haggai is saying, we haven't seen anything yet.
The best that God has for this world is still ahead-the desire of all the nations.
Haggai is saying that desire is good.
It is a God given emotion, and it is universal.
All nations have it.
You can try and follow Buddha and suppress it, but that is not God's way.
He wants you to desire His best.
The Old Testament rejects the Buddhist idea of eliminating desire.
Instead, it builds up hope, expands expectation, and delights in desire.
Psalm 37:4 says, "Delight yourself in the Lord and He shall give you the desires of your heart."
There are dozens of texts that make desire a desirable thing.
In the New Testament we are urged to desire the sincere milk of the word, and to desire the best gifts.
Desire is good and the best desire of all is the desired one that God promised to send for all the world.
People of every nation have always desired a deliverer.
Someone who can come and show a way to overcome the sinful nature and all of the negative consequences of sin.
Haggai says this is not just the desire of God's people, but all the peoples of the world have such a desire.
That is why one of the names of the Messiah is Desire Of All Nations.
The wise men from the East were waiting for the birth of a deliverer.
Virgil, the Latin poet, who lived in Rome a few years before the birth of Christ, wrote of his hope of a celestial seed who would come and bring peace.
Plato wrote,"We must wait patiently until someone, either a God or an inspired man, teach us our religious duties and remove the darkness from our eyes."
The Roman historian, Suetonius, wrote that it was an age old belief that a world ruler would come out of Judea.
Men of every nation have desired a God they could see.
Most all of the mythology of the ancients was about just such a theme.
It was the fantasy of all peoples that God would come into the world and be like them.
This fantasy of all the world became a reality on the first Christmas.
God became incarnated in flesh, visible to the eyes of humanity.
What men had waited for from the beginning of time, had come.
The desire of all nations had been fulfilled, and that is why Christmas is the greatest celebration of the year.
Before Christmas God was wholly other than man.
He was the infinite, exalted inaccessible and invisible God.
At Christmas all of this changed, for God came down to man's level, and all the way to an infant.
He came to a level of the visible, and could be touched.
He entered into a world where he had to grow and learn, and where he could feel pain and sorrow, and all the affects of a fallen world-even death.
This is just what men of every nation had always wanted, a God who would show He really cared by coming to share their life in this fallen world.
God satisfied the universal longing of the human heart that first Christmas.
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